“Great work, Niltci! That’s mountaineering for you!” laughed the Colonel as they dropped panting on the forest duff. “I suppose you could visualize this whole water crack, having once seen the fissure in the rim wall, eh?” Niltci grunted happily. He had no idea what that speech was all about, but evidently his adored Lord Colonel was pleased! Sid rejoined them, a moment later, and all sat and looked ruefully at their clothing. Their bleeding knees peeped through frayed and torn riding breeches, their buckskin gloves were out at the fingers; Sid had a scraped thigh, caked with blood; all the uppers of their cruiser moccasins gapped open in rent seams. Niltci, in his light cottons and buckskin leggings, seemed the least frazzled of the three, but his bare toes poked out from thin moccasins worn through on the rocks. It was half an hour before the Colonel sat up again. “And now, where are we?” he queried, briskly. “We’ve got all the rest of the day, so we’ll find the horses and go hang up a buck for camp meat.” They all rose and started off through the forest. A short walk through the high pines that covered the plateau brought the blue haze beyond, of the canyon again, and presently they came out on a rock pinnacle that commanded the whole prospect below. A sheer fall about a thousand feet lay below them. Beyond that smoky, purple depths showed beyond over the second rim. “The place where we came down must lie to the west of here, boys,” declared the Colonel. “Big John and Scotty are somewhere down in this valley--they’ll be all day getting back! We’ll start west for another look-see.” A second outlook from another point showed them the steep slope down which they had first come. Up in the ravine at the head of it would be the horses, for there they had first started the cougar. Soon they were in it and had remounted. “Sore and tattered, but still in the game!” ejaculated the Colonel as he put spurs to the roan and led back up the ravine into the hinterland. Back in here they found the huge flanks of Buckskin all cut up with rocky glades grown up with yellow pines, and gulches which led to high, walled canyons, all leading out to a discharge into the Grand Canyon, somewhere. Great pines grew heavily in the swales. It was a wonderful, rich, plentiful game country! Again and again Niltci grunted, to point down at deer tracks, wolf tracks, and the round hoof-prints of wild horses, and there seemed to be a cougar after every deer, judging from their frequent footprints! “Hist!” called the Colonel, suddenly, stooping down to whip out his .35 from its scabbard. The bushes shook, up in a densely grown ravine that lost itself somewhere in the upper flanks of the mountain. Gray shapes bounded across it, stiff-legged, flashing into sight occasionally, to disappear as quickly.